


Why Do We Fall?

by orphan_account



Category: Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Genre: (but you didn't need a fic to tell you that), Alternate Universe - Dark, Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gwen is better than you, Kidnapping, Peter does evil shit, but there is redemption
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-22
Updated: 2012-07-28
Packaged: 2017-11-10 11:40:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/465868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter Parker is built up by secrets, his family being one that is still kept from him, a plague of lies has spread over him and people are starting to want the truth, even if they get a twisted version of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Almost

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea why I started writing this but this film gave me tons of newfound inspiration, and the relationship of Gwen/Peter is seriously one of the most genuine I've seen on-screen in a ridiculously long time. I blame a lot of people for getting me obsessed in this, I also blame Andrew Garfield's crazy talent and arse. I tried to keep a lot of things canon to the 2012 film and the comics, including the villains and events and all that jazz. If you don't want to be spoiled of certain events then you probably shouldn't read this

Peter Parker would’ve called himself average, normal in the way society wanted him to be, utterly ordinary every way. He was good at his schoolwork, being brighter than almost all of the students in his class except for one, but no one cared about the person who runs second because second placers aren't winners. They are _almost_ winners, _almost_ the best, _almost_ touching to edge of glory but falling down before they could reach. Almost. Peter Parker was an almost. He could’ve called himself average, and he almost did, but that was before the sky became his sidewalk and human seemed far too brief of a definition.

 

In a time where nothing seemed to be working and his contacts were punched out of his eyelids in fistfights, Peter believed he was meant to lose, that his father knew this too and left so to spare seeing his child basking in the shadows of victors. It took him years to shake away the thoughts, it took even longer for him to find the truth and wish that all his father had done was leave out of defending his dignity. Peter had left his dignity behind when he realized no one thought he had any, they would watermark his arms in the colour red and paint his eyes black, but the bruises didn't mean much after awhile. Wounds heal but, as Peter learnt, hearts take longer to mend.

 

"You shouldn't keep secrets, they always come out in the end," Aunt May had once said, back when Peter thought secrets were just silly lies that were kept for silly reasons. This sentence came back to mock him more than he thought it ever would, so many secrets made of thin threads began clinging to him, making it easy for the keen to cut them off. And when the secrets started loosening their hold of him he found out why they weren't silly at all. Although, he had told almost all his secrets to a wide eyed Gwen Stacy, whom would stare at him like a young child being told fairytales for the first time. She was the first person he would go to when his secrets needed to be told, when his scratches were too deep for him to merely bandage up himself. "You should be more careful" Gwen would huff, wiping away the blood from off his chest with a cloth that had soaked up the remnants of fights more times than Gwen could bear to count. Each bruise took only a few days to heal but scars took their places; he hated how the only thing that hid them was his mask. His mask hid a lot of things, it hid the truth and it hid lies and in the end it was his only downfall. He was a self-proclaimed nothing before the mask and as soon as he pulled it on he became more than _just_ Peter, he became Spider-man.

 

Peter Parker was kidnapped on the Fourth of July 2012, an ironic date intentionally chosen for the events that were to come. The bugler alarm went off at exactly 11:02, Peter had installed it himself after his Uncle nearly fell of a ladder trying to wire it up, and the needle went into his neck at exactly 11:06. Sleep had always been one of Peter’s weaknesses, in sleep you open yourself up to thoughts your mind tries to keep away and to people you wouldn’t dare go to in your consciousness. They came into his room like shadows, Peter wished that spiders could hear what human couldn’t even in sleep but that gift was never given, sticking to the walls and corners so not to wake anyone. He didn’t feel their body heat as they surrounded him, he didn’t feel the sharp prick go into his neck, he didn’t feel anything till he woke up three days later in a room that was all but an unfamiliar blur.

 

Gwen sits and stares at the TV, her face is blank and her eyes are cold as she watches. Pete’s face is staring at hers like a ghost, a photograph of him from their school is filling the screen, the word “Missing” is written underneath in bolded letters that are shown to be more important than he is. The reporter says his name and things you could get from a phonebook, and Gwen can’t bear to watch any longer. Missing, 6”0ft, brown hair. How is it so easy for a stranger to summarize a person they’ve never met? Peter wasn’t a novel, a piece of words to be paraphrased and forgotten. He was a boyfriend, he liked Alfred Hitchcock films, skateboarding, and he hated his Aunt’s cooking. The television turned off in a flash and Gwen sat with her hair clenched in fists. The knots are tying her fingers up like chains, she flexed her thumbs, and she felt her nails scratching her head. She lets out a small whimper, her cheek feeling cold without his hand upon it, and prays for a knock on the window.  


	2. Moments And Deception

The harsh lamplight flooded in through Peter’s eyelids, and he flinched as if it were sun drowning the dark through window shutters. He’d been locked up for a week, maybe a month, maybe longer but the days seemed to be molded in a blur of concrete and dust. He wondered what people thought had happened to him, all the stupid stories that he knew were going around school, he wondered how Aunt May was taking it, he wondered what Gwen thought had happened to him. Peter wondered about Gwen a lot more than the others. He could picture her listening to her Dad’s old police radio with the volume on low, it never did get taken out when he died, and waiting. Waiting for a sign, or a whisper, or a shout that he was alive, or breathing or even worse, _okay_. Okay was far from what Peter was. He had a deep gash in his arm that his kidnappers had aimlessly cut, it was deep and long and it throbbed but it was kept almost pristinely clean as foreign liquid was pumped into his veins. Peter must have looked ridiculous to anyone that didn’t know what a hard prison cell it was to crack, his legs were folded like a schoolboy and his arms were attached to the ceiling by a thread of web much like his own. Except this web was sharp, and thin, and unforgiving. This web could not be cut.

 

Photographs, moments that were frozen and dissected into a smiling frame of film, followed Gwen around as if to scream at her that this is all she would have now. Memories of when school work seemed important and Peter Parker was just another boy in her class were nailed up in frames that didn’t seem to cover every inch of her wall until now. She felt like she’d been framed too, in a glass case of worry and uselessness that came with the wait, and pinned down so as not to blow in the winds of hope that would soon rush past. The policemen that had once come around for coffees and apple pie had questioned her, asking her pointless questions about the past that meant nothing to the present, and she would answer them all with the same tone and the same sad smile that said she was coping. Gwen never liked the word coping, it made things sound permanent and set, that things would never change from their present state. If coping meant moving on and accepting the worst then Gwen Stacy didn’t want to cope; she wanted to believe.

 

Peter had only seen the face of his kidnapper once, it was on the third day of his disappearance and it was the first day of the injections that he saw the face of a man distorted by hatred and wits, a face of a man Peter had seen many times before. Peter’s vision had still been fogged my the chemicals which drifted on the tip of his stomach, but the man’s features were too familiar, too longing, to be of those of a stranger. He’d smiled, a wide grin that flashed gnawing teeth and the smell of expensive wine, and paced around Peter as if to mock his captivity. He taunted his freedom like a rich man flashed shiny cars to the poor

“Which do you prefer Mr. Parker, Peter or Spider-man?” he’d asked, venom coating his words like acid

“Depends who’s asking.” Peter barely wheezed, still in the space between sleep and wake

“I’ll just keep it at Mr. Parker then, shall I?” a snide laugh then escaped the mans lips, he enjoyed confusion, even more so, panic “Now, what to use on our Mr. Parker here” he’d asked to an invisible bystander to the scene

“If you’re gonna threaten me with a butter knife like this other guy did, you should-“ Peter gave a short, dry cough “-should know it’s my Kryptonite.”

“Oh no, I was going to use some insecticide on you, but we both know that would be too easy,” the man had sneered, striding back into the dark as he turned from figure to shadow. And Peter knew then that it wasn’t going to be an easy escape, a simple lock picking and a punch couldn’t stop this man, because this man was hardly a man at all. Norman Osborn was far from human anymore.

 

Twelve weeks, three days, one night and six injections were what Peter had to deal with after Norman sent him back into the world, why he ever let him go after all the hours that had gone by was beyond Peter, leaving him at the footstep of the police department as if Peter was a stray dog, whimpering and weak. The first police officer to walk out the door was the first person to see Peter without the brave mask he had made, a scared boy who pretended to be a man.  Phones began dialing news networks and families, the word found being used far too flippantly when all they’d done is been given back what was taken, Aunt May being one of the first to burst through the doors and bundle Peter up in her arms

“I was so worried,” she gulped, keeping her tears down her throat “Don’t you ever do this to me again, young man.”

“I know,” Peter breathed with a smile, taking in the smell of home that perfumed his Aunt so heavily, and for a second, for a tiny glimmering instant, Peter felt safe.


	3. The Beginning of a Victim

A fly gullible enough to believe that glass could be flown through hit the window with a thud, buzzing and repeating it’s downfall till it flew off. Gwen had spent hours at the window, sitting by and gazing at a changing sky that turned from bright blue to a pool of red hues and sunset. It was like a canvas, the way it was painted over and over, every day it changed, and when the paint got too think it turned to grey, the sky turned to rain clouds. She watched a sky had lent it’s shade to a dark black with speckled stars that shone far too dimly in the city lights, and that’s when she saw him. A dash of red swiftly glides across her view, a shining thread of web glistened in the light of her lamp, and the face of her lost boy smiling at her like he had never been lost at all. He knocks on her window as if she can’t see him; the memory of the noise was the one thing that had kept her sane through the weeks that had past, and she walks over to him as quickly as she can manage. She watches him climb through the window, scraping his knee on the edge of the frame, and holds out a hand so that he can stand. Peter stands more balanced than he had before, waiting for the silence to be lost in words like he knew it would, moving his feet so they touch the tips of her toes. She leans upward, he leans forward, their foreheads caressing softly as they listen to the quiet that never seems to last, the quiet that shatters so easily as if it were a china plate. This quiet was a different brand of stillness, it was a warm hum of relief compared to the empty lonesome silence that had filled their ears only days ago, this silence was full. She goes to speak, but her words are eaten up by the calm, the right words are lost to her in a dictionary filled with dust, and he steals the first words

“Did you miss me?” he whispers far too quietly

“Do you really need to ask?” she whispers back with a small smile on the corner of her lip

“I don’t know,” Peter says, nudging his cheek upon hers, “I guess I thought maybe…“

“The police are saying you can’t remember where you were taken, they also said you were most likely… Where were you, Peter?” Gwen says before he can finish, not wanting to yell at him for thinking she would do any less than miss him

“I guess this is the first time the police are actually right about something, all I remember is this guy… But I don’t remember who he was; I just know that I know him… He was so familiar… I guess I’ll remember when I catch him.” he lets out a small groan of frustration at his apparent loss of memory, shaking his heads as if he thought by doing so his brain would unclog the past. It couldn’t.

Gwen huffs. She knew he would say something like this, something to throw away his safety just as he gains it back; he was like this with most things. He gained things only to lose them, he did things in an attempt to gain them back, but he always lost more than he started with after he tried “When you catch him? Peter, I - I don’t want you becoming my dad. I don’t want you to go out and risk your life all the time, and leave me here to wait for you; I want to know that you’re going to… That you’re going to come home like he didn’t. You don’t have go out looking for this guy, you don’t have to keep fighting like you do.”

“If I don’t fight then who else will? You don’t understand, I have to stop him Gwen, he knows I’m Spider-man.”

“There are most important things than your mask Peter.”

 

Eugene Flash Thompson walked onto the makeshift basketball court with a spider printed on the front of his chest and a determined glare etched onto his face. Another night had ended in a beaten chest and an empty bottle of red wine, the stench of the liquid still stained itself to his scent as if to follow him after the bruises stopped aching. The ground was lit by a single lamp, it flickered its thin stream of light as he started dribbling the ball, taking steps that could have been leaps if his feet had reached any higher. His shoelaces were undone, they whipped against his ankles as he moved and twisted around his feet like chains, but he didn’t stop to tie them up. The ball spun towards the ring as he threw it, spiraling towards the edge, and fell downwards as it ricocheted off the hollow metal hoop. Like the fly that had hit Gwen’s window, Flash went onto repeating his failure to he finally threw the ball angrily into the dark of suburban New York, only to have it roll straight back. The word victim had two meanings, the first being a person who is tricked, the second being a person who is made to suffer. Flash had been called a victim far too many times in his life to have it end with it plastered on his forehead, he’d many too many people into victims to know why the word stung anymore. To be broken, to break, to repair, the unspoken truth that lay underneath Flash’s every action. Why stay broken, when you can break another just as easily? The philosophy that Flash had conjured, only to have one of his victims acquire. Knowing there would hardly be an answer from an empty street yet too blinded by fear the of the unknowing that lingered to wait till the dark hang him to the ceiling by a noose, Flash peered further into the road that had turned into his unwitting, taking small messy tiptoes forward.  He was sure to find a stray cat or a dog that had wandered off too far from it’s leash, yet the only thing he found was an unfamiliar body and thick streaks of red gore arranged in the form of giant letters. Letters that spelled the words, “Who’s puny now,” a sentence that could only ever be composed by one _friendly_ neighborhood spider. 


End file.
